Spill Panel Finds U.S. Was Slow to React

ENLARGE

Workers cleaned up along a stretch of beach in June in Grand Isle, La.
Getty Images

By

Stephen Power and

Tennille Tracy

Updated Oct. 7, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration was slow to ramp up its response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, then overreacted as public criticism turned the disaster into a political liability, the staff of a special commission investigating the disaster say in papers released Wednesday.

In four papers issued by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, commission investigators fault the administration for giving too much credence to initial estimates that just 1,000 barrels of oil a day were flowing from the ruptured
BP
PLC well, and for later allowing political concerns to drive decisions such as how to deploy people and material—such as oil-containing boom—to contain the spreading oil.

"Though some of the command structure was put in place very quickly, in other respects the mobilization of resources to combat the spill seemed to lag," the commission investigators found.

More

Coast Guard and other federal emergency-response officials told the commission they wouldn't have acted differently if they had known the spill rate was much greater than BP's initial 1,000 barrel a day estimate.

But the spill commission investigators write that "for the first ten days of the spill, it appears that a sense of over optimism affected responders."

The commission staff said it is "possible that inaccurate flow-rate figures may have hindered the sub-sea efforts to stop and to contain the flow of oil at the wellhead."

The government later revised the estimate of the oil flow to between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day.

In a written joint statement Wednesday, the White House's acting budget director, Jeffrey Zients, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco said "the federal government response was full force and immediate, and the response focused on state and local plans and evolved when needed."

The statement also disputed the spill commission staff's findings that administration officials took too long to grasp the gravity of the spill, although the statement didn't directly address the question of what the administration believed the spill rate to be during the period between April 20 and April 28, the day NOAA released an estimate that the spill rate was 5,000 barrels a day.

The White House said senior administration officials said in early May the worst case could be oil flowing at a rate of 100,000 barrels a day.

As the spill dragged on into late May, the spill commission staff wrote, the administration appears to have misdirected resources in its efforts to counter the public view that its response was inadequate. By May 27, polls showed that 60% of respondents thought the government was doing a poor job of responding to the spill, the commission staff wrote.

In late May, President Barack Obama said he would triple the federal manpower to respond to the spill. But Coast Guard personnel told the commission in interviews that they had enough equipment by the end of May.

"Tripling, or at least the arguable overreaction to the public perception of a slow response resulted in resources being thrown at the spill in general rather than being targeted in an efficient way," the commission staff wrote.

Political concerns drove what the commission staff calls "Boom Wars," as local governments in the Gulf region jockeyed to secure from federal officials more of the oil-containing boom that "became a symbol of how responsive the government was to local communities."

Boom "was eventually distributed according to political imperatives," the commission staff concludes.

The commission staff also questions whether BP's company interests could have conflicted with national interests. BP took control of ship traffic above the well, For example, government scientists who were trying to determine the rate of the spill flow grew frustrated with BP's ability to control access to the well.

"Given that its potential liability under the Clean Water Act depended directly on the flow rate, BP had real incentives to maintain exclusive control over the ability to estimate that rate," the commission investigators wrote.

"We're not going to comment on draft working papers," a BP spokesman said.

The commission staff also takes the administration to task for characterizing a federal report on the fate of oil as having been subjected to "peer review" by independent scientists. In fact, the commission staff paper says, it is unclear whether any independent scientists actually reviewed the paper prior to its release in August.

The federal report issued in August said that about three-quarters of the oil spilled by the well had broken down or been cleaned up. Those estimates have been challenged as overly rosy by some independent scientists. The commission staff paper says the August report "was simply not designed to explain, or capable of explaining" the oil's fate.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.